[Landline] Shhh...

On secrecy and value

The path to the cemetery is full of life.

Apologies for the lower than promised publication of Landline over the last couple of months.If you’re a paying subscriber and would like a refund due to the lack of posts, please reply to this email and I’ll see to it that you’re made whole. 

What can I say? Mind has been a bit dull and tired and sad/defeated lately, which, for whatever reason, is not the mindframe I like to write from for Landline readers. 

But I’ve also not been sure how much I’ve really had to share.

The most meaningful activity I’ve been doing lately, as often as I can, has been wandering the forested hills in a state approaching some kind of inarticulable bliss-fascination. I feel blessed, fortunate, grateful, maybe overwhelmed (again!) at how dependably revivifying an encounter with wild nature is.

It’s hard, for me, to communicate the luminous intensity. And even if I could, perhaps that communication would not be necessary, or even helpful.

Because like a lot of other folks—I think?—I’ve been wondering lately how much more media we need.

How many recordings and mediated communications and announcements and rolling public accounts and presentations of one’s personal life, or of others’, really serve any greater, useful purpose?

Must so much be disclosed and disseminated?

Out of all that we do, is it really the mediated and published and viewed that counts the most?

And if not, what does…?

I remember quipping once to a professional photographer that maybe some things were too important to be photographed. I didn’t say that to denigrate their practice, although in retrospect how could it come off as anything but that… I didn’t mean that only photography, out of all the modes of communication, should be limited… I included text journalism, which was my ‘profession,’ too, after all.

My point—clumsily expressed—was meant to be general, for all public media: that there are things, times, moments, periods—probably many more than we might think —which we media/arts people should just let be.

Not everything needs to be told, publicly. Allow a liberated, profoundly private space to exist, uncontaminated and unreported—uncontaminated sometimes precisely because it is unreported—recorded, perhaps, but unpublished, undistributed.

A humble suggestion: Allow this for others; also, allow it for yourself.

Recently, coincidentally, I came across this concise, undated poem on this general subject from the late anarchist scholar-theorist Peter Lamborn Wilson (PLW), a frequent person-who-is-quoted-in Landline, who, as always, is diamond-mind inspiring and insightful:

Under his Hakim Bey alias, PLW famously formulated the concept of the temporary autonomous zone, or TAZ, writing:

Stephen Pearl Andrews once offered, as an image of anarchist society, the dinner party, in which all structure of authority dissolves in conviviality and celebration.

Pearl Andrews was right: the dinner party is already “the seed of the new society taking shape within the shell of the old” (IWW Preamble). The sixties-style “tribal gathering,” the forest conclave of eco-saboteurs, the idyllic Beltane of the neo-pagans, anarchist conferences, gay faery circles…Harlem rent parties of the twenties, nightclubs, banquets, old-time libertarian picnics–we should realize that all these are already “liberated zones” of a sort, or at least potential TAZs. Whether open only to a few friends, like a dinner party, or to thousands of celebrants, like a Be-In, the party is always “open” because it is not “ordered”; it may be planned, but unless it “happens” it’s a failure. The element of spontaneity is crucial.

The essence of the party: face-to-face, a group of humans synergize their efforts to realize mutual desires, whether for good food and cheer, dance, conversation, the arts of life; perhaps even for erotic pleasure, or to create a communal artwork, or to attain the very transport of bliss…¹

PLW goes on, and it’s all worth reading, and re-reading. (Read it here.)

But for now, let’s just combine parts of the two texts and say: maybe we would be better off if we let the festive dinner party be. 

And going further with that, perhaps we would be better off, right now, with having more festive dinner parties — with more under-the-radar activities — with operating in the “vast potential Outside,” outside of media, in “whole-body communication” as much as we can.

I find myself increasingly attracted to folks, or groups of folks, who operate privately but say just enough in public to let us know what they’re doing. Who leave the specifics unrecorded and undistributed. Who get good stuff done that way.

You could say it’s all very Tristero — or, Lodge 49 — and yes, it is, and anyway, what’s wrong with that, but I’m serious: these people, these activities, of course exist — and some of them have public aspects that don’t undermine the underlying activity itself.

Here are a few examples that come to mind:

Crosswalks Collective LA

From a March 2023 NPR report by Vanessa Romo:

There's a mystery on the streets of Hollywood in Los Angeles.

A series of striped crosswalks suddenly appeared at a busy residential intersection, and the secretive group that claims it's behind the do-it-yourself project says it has more in the works.

So far, [Crosswalk Collective LA] has revealed little about its membership or if there was a particular incident that preceded the safety installation, but it is clear they intend to continue to take matters into their own hands.

"We are a small group of community members who have tried for years to request crosswalks and other safe streets infrastructure the official way," they told NPR in a statement.

"At every turn, we've been met with delays, excuses, and inaction from our city government, as well as active hostility to safe streets projects from sitting councilmembers…”

"The city doesn't keep us safe, so we keep us safe," [the group] announced on Twitter in a post that included photos of the freshly painted intersection at a four-way stop at Romaine Street and Serrano Avenue…

Secret Mall Apartment

These guys documented their secret thing —

In 2003, eight Rhode Islanders created a secret apartment inside a busy mall and lived there for four years, filming everything along the way. Far more than a wild prank, the secret apartment became a deeply meaningful place for all involved.

—but didn’t really tell their story for 17 years. Now they’ve made a documentary film.

Local TV news story on the occasion of Secret Mall Apartment’s release earlier this year:

The Crested Saguaro Society

A semi-public group who seek out, record and keep secret the location of spectacular mutant specimens of the Saguaro cactus across the Sonoran Desert. From “Secretive Society Keeps Watch Over Arizona’s Holy Grail of Cactus” by Emily Curtis, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 2023:

…As a security measure, Mr. Orman, 62, a retired aerospace engineer in Prescott, Ariz., and Theodore Codding, 62, a retired public administrator in Tucson, Ariz., are the only two members with access to the society’s full database. The idea is to protect the locations from would-be poachers or vandals.

When [Crested Saguaro Society member] Mr. Cardell was alive, he used to load new location discoveries onto CDs and thumb drives, Mr. Codding said. Then [he] would hand them to the person running the database.

From https://www.crestedsaguarosociety.org/Best/crest44.php

“Bob liked to look you in the eyeballs when he shared information,” Mr. Codding said. The group has turned down requests even from researchers to share the list. “We have trust issues,” he said.

The society is prickly about admitting new members, seeking only those with sufficient passion and prudence. Some in the group said they had to first share their discoveries before they were considered for membership.

Mr. Orman ignores anyone who writes to the website to ask about joining, he said. He wants the group to first agree on a way to vet the motives and character of aspirants. Members are debating nondisclosure agreements. Yet without new members, they know they risk losing hard-won secrets.

“We’re the keepers of the Holy Grail,” Mr. Orman said. “Unless we can find some younger people to join the society and then share that database with them, it’s just gonna die with us.”

Their mission has some urgency. Society members worry about the expansion of the state’s metropolitan regions, and the tramping about of newly arrived hikers and looky-loos. A crowd of even the most respectful admirers can inadvertently damage delicate cactus roots. Removing saguaros requires a permit, but that doesn’t stop cactus poachers who risk arrest.

A friend of a friend

There are a number of public groups across the planet engaged in the righteous work of removing obsolete barbed wire fencing from rural lands in the interest of restoring age-old wildlife migration patterns.²

But there’s other folks who do this work too, under the radar.

I recently met a friend of a friend who, as a private practice, for no compensation whatsoever, on her own schedule, without any personal interaction, comes to your rural wilderness land and removes old barbed wire fence.

Why?

“I just find it tremendously satisfying,” this incredible senior human told me when I finally met her in person, early one spring morning.

$25 bolt cutters from Ace Hardware, thick protective gloves, deep pocket workpant, a tie-dyed long sleeve shirt and a fence needing cutting were all she needed to do something that benefits her—via, literally, liberating wildlife.

No business card, no Instagram account, no money changing hands.

Just the act, in and of itself, in private, made possible through a chain of trust and goodwill.

Keep it hid,

Jay Babcock

Arizona

Detail from Käthe Kollwitz, Conspiracy (1895), h/t James C. Scott

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1. The quotation from TAZ continues: “– in short, a ‘union of egoists’ (as Stirner put it) in its simplest form–or else, in Kropotkin’s terms, a basic biological drive to ‘mutual aid.’ (Here we should also mention Bataille’s ‘economy of excess’ and his theory of potlatch culture.)” Go forth and investigate these thinkers!

2. Here in Arizona, we have Desert Fence Busters. And in Wyoming, there’s the Absaroka Fence Initiative (AFI), who Hillary Rosner wrote about for National Geographic in 2021:

AFI has been organizing fence-removal and modification events over the past year. One in May drew 80 volunteers, who removed three miles of fencing, consisting of nearly 4,000 pounds of wire and posts.

The July effort was smaller, with 25 volunteers recruited from AFI’s ranks rather than the general public. Teams were organized and fanned out to several sites across the ranch. For three hours we slowly made our way south and then east between a road and an irrigated field, removing fasteners that held barbed wire onto posts, clipping and rolling huge lengths of wire, and untangling the strands from thick sagebrush that had grown up and entwined itself around the fencing.

The ranch owner, who asked to remain anonymous, pointed out several well-worn elk trails that the animals used several times a day to cross from the hills down into the valley.

By the time the work was done for the day, the teams had removed two miles of fencing.

For volunteers, this kind of work yields instant gratification, a sense that you are having a direct impact on the land and animals. ….